This is the class blog for Eng 1102 at GA Tech called "Fiction, Human Rights, and Social Responsibility." The purpose of this blog is to extend our discussion beyond the classroom and to become aware of human rights issues that exist in the world today and how technology has played a role in either solving or aggravating them. Blogs will be a paragraph long (250 words) and students will contribute once every three weeks according to class number. Entries must be posted by Friday midnight.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Modern Colonialism: Who Knew?

We have all
read the books and heard the stories. We know about the many tragedies that have occurred throughout
history—the Holocaust, the Crusades, North American and African slavery—but
there seems to be a general assumption within the public that these atrocious
human rights violations are things of the past. After all, numerous world
conventions have met and many documents have been made, such as the The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in order to combat events such as
colonization of indigenous peoples and the resulting tragedies that tend to
come with this. So, these things don’t happen in the modern world, right?

Wrong.

Recently it was revealed that a Canadian mining company by
the name of Hudbay Minerals, Inc. has received a suit from the Mayan Q'eqchi'
people of Lote Ocho, Guatemala, and will be standing trial for numerous gang rapes,
murders, and attacks that were committed against Indigenous Guatemalans by Compañía
Guatemalteca de Níquel, of which Hudbay Minerals, Inc. is the parent company. Cory Wanless, an attorney with the Toronto-based
Klippensteins law firm said,
“It is a massive victory for our
clients and for human rights.” “Before this decision, no claim brought by
individuals that had been harmed by Canadian mining abroad had ever gotten into
Canadian courts at all. They didn’t even have the ability to forward their
claims.”

To make matters worse, Canadian mining companies have been known for their
repression of Guatemalans in this region since the 1970s and 1980s. While it
may be a “massive victory” for the rights of little-known indigenous peoples to
be recognized and upheld, it is still inexcusable that companies can get away
with neglectful behaviors for so long. These rapes and murders are an effort to
get the indigenous peoples off their land so that foreign companies can come in
and extract the natural resources there—in other words, modern colonialism at
its worst.

Fortunately for the natives of Lote
Ocho, justice will come eventually. “This case is the first of this kind but I think that claims like this
are going to be much more common,” Wandless said. “It is no longer possible for Canadian courts
to deny that this is a Canadian problem that deserves a Canadian solution.”

Hopefully
this trial can serve to show how we must all constantly be on guard to protect
those who are helpless from human rights violations. Otherwise these tragedies
will continue to occur and history will be on repeat once again.